Atmel Sensor Hub MCU Helps Enhance Samsung Galaxy S4 User Experience, Battery Life

A provider of microcontroller (MCU) and touch technology solutions, Atmel Corporation recently made it known that its AVR microcontroller-based sensor hub solution was used in Samsung's latest flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S4.

With a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 processor in the North American version of the S4 — the international version sports Samsung's own Exynos 5 Octa processor — 2GB of RAM, and help from Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean's Project Butter smoothness optimizations, Samsung's phone may seem like it needs little extra help providing a responsive experience. However, the Atmel sensor hub management MCU helps at the sensor level, bringing the S4's user experience to another level.

The S4 boasts the latest in sensors that detect motion, including an accelerometer, RGB light, digital compass, proximity, gyro, humidity, barometer and gestures — a combination that would stress even the best mobile hardware. Atmel's sensor hub gathers and processes data from all of these sensors in real time, providing an improved user experience across a number of applications, such as gaming and navigation.

"Our customers have come to expect the ultimate experience from our flagship Samsung Galaxy smartphones," said Sueng-jun Park, senior engineer at Samsung Electronics. "For that reason, we selected the Atmel sensor hub MCU to ensure the motion-related applications, including gaming, navigation and virtual reality, are hyper-sensitive to real-time direction and orientation."

Furthermore, with a 4.99-inch touchscreen and full 1080p resolution, the Galaxy S4 places a lot of stress on its 2,600 mAh battery. Fortunately, the Atmel sensor hub helps on this front as well, lowering overall system power consumption with the help of picoPower technology, allowing for improved battery life.

Atmel's picoPower technology — which can be found in a number of the company's products — eliminates unnecessary power consumption for best-in-class energy savings and performance.

"With a sensor hub management solution, Atmel allows Galaxy S4 users the ability to enjoy applications requiring real-time motion sensing, without ever compromising battery life," said Ingar Fredriksen, senior director of Flash-based Microcontrollers, Atmel Corporation.